Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Profile portrait with roses and clockwork

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A drawn profile of a woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, framed by two large roses and falling petals. Soft pencil shading models the face and hair, while fine thin linework forms a circle of gears, dials and small dots behind her. The image is a warm sepia tone on a textured, aged-paper background, with the roses in the corners balancing the composition.

Botanical Realism Woman Profile Portrait Rose Petal Clockwork Gear Dial Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chronometer stopped again at four bells in the middle watch, and you were the only one awake to hear the silence where its tick should have been. You open the brass case under the lamp the way Mr Okonedo taught you, one hand steadying the gimbal as the ship lifts and drops. Inside, the gear train spreads like a town seen from a hill, each small wheel turning its neighbour, and the balance spring sits still as a held breath.

Keep reading

The rule aboard is simple. Wind it at eight each morning, log the reading, never let the captain catch you guessing. But you have been guessing for a week, because the figures you carry in your head belong to a harbour at the other end of the world. Every dawn you have set the hands to where home should be, not where the sun says the ship is. Last night the mate found the discrepancy in your handwriting and said nothing, which was worse.

So you do the honest sum. You take the sextant out onto the wet deck and wait for the horizon to sharpen, the spray stinging your cheek, and you measure the sun's height against the printed tables. Then you come back down and reset the balance to the true meridian, watching the second hand jump and settle into a steady rhythm.

At first light a pressed rose petal slides from the lid of the case where you had tucked it for luck, and the wind lifts it through the porthole. You watch it skate across the grey swell until it is only a fleck, and then you write the longitude in the log, in ink, without crossing anything out.